AMD Opteron 2000 vs Intel Xeon 5100 review

The ‘chip wars’ between AMD and Intel have being going in the former’s favour for the last few years – at least as far as workstations are concerned. In the past month though, Intel has launched a major offensive with the recent release of its Xeon 5100 range – previously codenamed ‘Woodcrest’ and based on the same chip technology behind the company’s Core Duo processors – and AMD has returned fire with its Opteron 2000 range.

So which of these two technologies is the best for your next workstation? To help us find out, Armari kindly built us two near-identical systems based around two equivalent versions of each chip. Unusually these are nearly equal in speed – two dual-core 2.66GHz Xeon 5150s against two dual-core 2.6GHz Opteron 2218s – as well as price, when you factor in the overall cost including the motherboard and the relevant types of RAM.

To give the processors the chance to strut their stuff, each workstation included 8GB of RAM, a top-rated ATI (soon to be AMD) Fire GL V7300 graphics card, two 10,000rpm hard drives and a copy of Windows XP 64-bit. This pushes the overall price towards the £4,000 mark, but it would easily be possible to design a more affordable system around either chip.

Of the new chips, Intel’s Xeon’s 5100 line is the greatest leap from the previous generation. The chips have two processor cores and 2MB of Level 2 cache, and the front-side bus speed has been raised to 1.3GHz. They add support for FB-DIMM DDR2 memory, which is apparently more reliable than previous types, and use a lot less power than older Xeons (keeping your power bills down and helping save the planet). It’s the change to the Core architecture that’s made the most difference, boosting overall performance dramatically.

These are also the chips used by Apple’s first Intel-based workstation, the Mac Pro.

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